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eldavojohn writes "News outlets are reporting that AMD has partnered with BlueStacksto bring Android apps to AppZone Player, something that will apparently allow the more than 500,000 mobile apps to run on your PC. From their announcement: 'What's special about the player on AMD-based products? There are many challenges with running apps that were originally designed for phones or tablets on a PC that in most cases has a larger screen and higher resolution display. To solve this, BlueStacks has designed and optimized the player for AMD Radeon graphics and in particular, our OpenGL drivers found in our APUs and GPUs so you get a great 'big-screen' experience. Additionally, the apps are integrated into AppZone, our online showcase and one-stop-shop for apps accelerated by AMD technology.' Unfortunately this appears to only work on AMD-based PCs (although nowhere does it say that it won't work on Intel CPUs or non-Radeon GPUs). Also no word on how they overcame the difference between a mouse and touchscreen (think pinch to zoom)."

Having run my own apps in the iPhone/iPad simulator, I can say it's nowhere near as good as the real thing. And apps on 'the real thing' are usually nowhere near as good as they would be on my desktop, except for portability and touchscreen-specific features. I have no desire for a solution that combines all the downsides of both PCs and portable devices.

Admittedly, there is the rare phone app that, for no obvious reason, has no match on the PC, but even rarer is an app that would be worth the inconvenience and inevitable compatibility issues that would come from using a shim-ulator like this. And for those, why not just... use your phone?

Unfortunately, if this takes off (and I can't really imagine it will), it would only encourage lazy developers to build compromised designs that work passably on phones and PCs without taking advantage of the unique strengths of either. It would be another decade of the same write-once-suck-everywhere that Java and Flash brought us.

And for all of you, who I'm certain aren't interested in the slightest, here's my dramatic reading of the announcement:

[The new hotness will] allow the more than 500,000 mobile apps to run on your PC

*based on our estimate that soon all PCs will be Windows 8 multi-touch tablets—Steve Ballmer said so!—and all Android developers partner with us.

'What's special about the player on AMD-based products?

We call it: "Vendor lock-in!"

There are many challenges with running apps that were originally designed for phones or tablets on a PC that in most cases has a larger screen and higher resolution display

Likewise, there are many challenges with using the Mario Kart wheel to control a 747.

To solve this, BlueStacks has designed and optimized the player for AMD Radeon graphics and in particular, our OpenGL drivers found in our APUs and GPUs so you get a great 'big-screen' experience.

To solve this, we use only pink Mario Kart wheels, and in particular, pink wheels covered in our proprietary glitter for the best possible experience.

Additionally, the apps are integrated into AppZone, our online showcase and one-stop-shop for apps accelerated by AMD technology.'

You'll be able to use ANY Android app...that's tweaked for our service and available in our store. There'll be dozens! [bluestacks.com]

BlueStacks has achieved some incredible momentum

We think it will revolutionize the whole software market, just as CrossOver made Windows a thing of the past!

Because my phone is an Audiovox 8610 on Virgin Mobile, which doesn't run Android apps. If I were to upgrade to a phone that supported Android apps, my monthly bill would be seven times as big ($15 per 3 months payLo plan vs. $35 per month Beyond Talk plan).

Because you find an app that you wish you had it on your desktop? Duh!

Case in point, the Tango app became very popular in my friends circle. Even when I was in front my laptop, I had to use my phone to video chat with someone. Until recently they did not have a desktop application. I would have definitely used this tool, if I could have.

There are oddly enough some apps that don't have a good equivalent on the PC side.

A good example is Torque Pro, an amazingly awesome OBDII app for $4.99 . Does things stand alone OBDII readers could never do, even ones costing thousands of dollars can't do the things this little program can. And it is easy to use.

Another example is Cam Scanner. There are a lot of programs that can do image manipulation but hardly anything that can automatically produce useful results.

Cam Scanner on my phone works nicely but the camera is crap compared to any decent digital camera (>$100) so I am still looking for an easy way to digitize documents without having to scan them. There a quite a few people searching on different forums but nothing similar for Windows, Linux or Mac seems available.

1. Get your 'decent digital camera' and take pictures of the documents. (point a directional (reading) lamp at them)

2. Copy the pictures from the camera to your PC.

3. ????

4. Profit!

You didn't mention OCR, so I assume you don't care.If you want PDFs, there are many options for 'printing' the images to PDF, or you could use ImageMagik or some other program to do it in batches.

Do they sync with phones whose service costs $100 per year, or does one have to upgrade to a smartphone whose service costs $400+ per year?

You do not need a developer account. That is only if you write IOS apps. It is free to create Andriod apps which is why I own a droid.

I agree with you: Android fits my needs better because of the lack of a recurring cost for a developer account. But I was referring to the cost of cellular service, not a developer account. I currently carry a separate 4" Android tablet and dumbphone because dumbphone service from Virgin Mobile costs $15 per three months. If I were to integrate them into one device, I'd have to pay for smartphone service, which from Virgin Mobile costs $35 per three months.

Here's a subjective reason. I have this game called Stone Age Game. You can recruit other players into your clan by typing in their ID, so people send their IDs back and forth. It's a pain to select an ID, change to another screen and then paste it in. It's boring and tedious. On a PC, I could do that in a tenth of the time.Stupid reason? Maybe, but it would at least improve my gameplay.

As sort of an off-topic aside to this, I *hate* these kinds of games, because they're not "MMOs" like they claim, they just force their users to do marketing for them to increase the amount of advertising they send to people. And actually, they're not games, they're just revenue machines for lazy people taking advantage of peoples' desires to level up.

Thankfully, they're usually easy to avoid - you can always tell it's one of these when users post their game IDs in their reviews, asking you to "add me pleas

Um, yes and no.First off, I have developed a great subconscious advert avoidance. I simply don't see them in the game. I also don't read reviews (such "games" don't deserve reviews to be written, let alone read). Why do I play it? Because I'm interested of what the next level unlocks. What have they been thinking about? Oh it's this weapon, oh it's that animal.The game is based on microtransactions, not ads. Whoever is dumb enough to pay for such a lazy 3-screens implementation deserve to have their money t

Actually I think the whole X86 OS world has contracted some kind of mass insanity, I mean every damned thing is either trying to ape a cell phone or like this bring cell phone crap onto X86...why? Unity, Win 8, this...why? Why would you WANT your PC to be a supergigantic smartphone [youtube.com] when all of the design choices on smartphones is either based on screen size (not applicable) or battery life (not applicable as what works on ARM won't save power on X86) so it just makes no damned sense to me.

How did you plan on scanning the QR codes? Most PCs don't come with a handheld rear-facing camera. Were you planning on holding them up to your monitor to scan them with a webcam, or were you planning on scanning them with a flatbed scanner?

What you would need to do is presume that on-click is one finger, and the mouse as it moves away is another finger allowing you 2d input.

I would do position at button down is the centre of the rotation, position at drag / release is the second point that defines the angle (with the reference angle being either right horizontal or up vertical, or something else depending on what floats your boat). Although if you do that, you don't get the drag motion that everyone expects, so you need keyboard accelerator keys + mouse for a reasonable (or better) equivalent to navigation using multi-touch.

every action a touchscreen can do is emulatable with a mouse. left click is touch, right click is hold tap, double click double tap, zoom scrollwheel, and you have the middle click not even mapped, perhaps torsion emulation, for screens where twisting the screen is a special function. and despite the patents not one of thes notions is truly original if you consider how they are so similar to mouse input. but i am not a patent specialist.

Pinch to zoom is pretty easily handled by the mouse wheel, or say click both the left and right mouse button and drag. You could also do 3 finger touch if you include the middle button. Things that wouldn't work with a mouse would be rotations for example. Those could be handled by buttons on the keyboard, or I guess mouse gestures or other button combinations (left and middle to rotate left for example).

Rotation is easily handled - moving the mouse left/right while holding the mousewheel down, for example. Unless there's also a need for panning while simultaneously zooming and rotating, of course.

On the other hand, how many apps do the two-finger rotation thing? And how many of those have you cursed for having it because every time you merely want to zoom, the app decides that you also want to rotate the view by 1 degree?

I see the lack of an accelerometer in most computers as a bigger issue. Even when it does have an accelerometer, that also happens to be accessible (perhaps as part of a laptop's mechanisms to help prevent damage to HDDs), a laptop isn't exactly something you start tilting around to e.g. play a racing game.

Still, there's plenty of apps that don't even need those things or you can make do with a kludge.

I see the lack of an accelerometer in most computers as a bigger issue. Even when it does have an accelerometer, that also happens to be accessible (perhaps as part of a laptop's mechanisms to help prevent damage to HDDs), a laptop isn't exactly something you start tilting around to e.g. play a racing game.

I'm rather suprised that this is windows only (Android actually uses the Linux kernel) - it's much harder to port to a completely different OS and different kernel, than it is to port to another OS with an almost-identical kernel.

Actually, while technical details are sparse, Bluestacks seems to emulate ARM instructions with their LayerCake technology, which also provides hardware gfx acceleration.Most Android games use native ARM code in a Dalvik/java wrapper, and Bluestacks seems to be able to run at least some unmodified.

If android actually gets a working X Windows you'll be able to have a little ARM device running the thing natively able to put it on your screen. With USB networking it could be a plug in dongle sort of thing.Of course that's not going to happen so the best we can ever expect is VNC. It astounds me that android took the 1980s approach of a local display only when every single android device has vastly more grunt than the sort of stuff that was happily running X in the late 1990s.

Until you run into situations like this where it's actually useful, such as my example above.Think about what a phone or tablet is for at least a full second. They are devices where their primary role is connecting to other devices over a network. Now can you see how a graphical system that is aware of networks should have been considered?

Why don't you just drop your netflix account? I'm sure no one will care.

Seriously, this. Netflix has made it clear times many over that they don't want any money from Linux users. So don't bother with them. There are plenty of other sources of media that do work on Linux just fine, many of which are cheaper and higher quality.

I use a multiclient messenger (IMO) on my phone that, sadly, does not have a desktop port.
Looking around, they did try to make one, and swiftly abandoned it.
Other than that, though, I don't think I'd use it for much, concept is still cool though.

The problem with phone applications in general is they are designed for either a small display (phone) or large display (tablet).A UI scrunched-up to fit a phone display suddenly becomes way too spacious when run on a tablet (let alone a 23" 1920x1600 monitor). Android tries to address this by allowing multiple layouts for your UI based on the display it's running on but I've not seen many applications actually implement that. I wonder how BlueStack is planning to address that. TFA sounds like they are mainly pimping "cloud sync" of app info.

I don't know whether it would actually be worth using; but dumping phone-sized applications onto the PC desktop as 'widgets' would be architecturally pretty doable, though the difference in pixel density between most phones and most PCs could make it rather ugly: If you mapped pixels 1:1, the app would end up looking fairly enormous on most monitors; but if you used monitor DPI to display the app at the same size as the phone's screen, bitmap UI elements would not be happy. You'd also run into the bigger qu

If you mapped pixels 1:1, the app would end up looking fairly enormous on most monitors; but if you used monitor DPI to display the app at the same size as the phone's screen, bitmap UI elements would not be happy.

Android applications can have four sets of bitmaps: low (120 dpi), medium (160 dpi), high (240 dpi), and retina (320 dpi). Phone-sized applications running in a window on the PC, with the title bar where the notification bar once was, would probably use the low density (ldpi) set.

You'd also run into the bigger question of whether anybody actually wants 'widgets'.

If thousands of phone-sized applications were suddenly made available as widgets, people might be more inclined to use them.

Pinch to zoom could easily be implemented using the scroll wheel of a mouse.

No, it can not.

For some reason I just replied to this and it didn't show. Yes, it certainly could. The position of the mouse would be the focus of the zoom and the scroll wheel would scroll in and out. Tell me why that wouldn't work.

1. The reason pinch-to-zoom works is because the other finger is defining range by human intuition. The scroll wheel does not provide even similar intuitive feedback, not to mention the ergonomics of trying to hold a button down and zoom.

2. Most scroll wheels provide clicks, not a smooth roll. (Think: the difference between integers and floats.)

Now I don't know for sure, but I'd also be willing to bet that that when an app does a pinch-to-zoom, they're not doing anything special to identify it

1. The reason pinch-to-zoom works is because the other finger is defining range by human intuition. The scroll wheel does not provide even similar intuitive feedback, not to mention the ergonomics of trying to hold a button down and zoom.

2. Most scroll wheels provide clicks, not a smooth roll. (Think: the difference between integers and floats.)

Now I don't know for sure, but I'd also be willing to bet that that when an app does a pinch-to-zoom, they're not doing anything special to identify it as such. The software wouldn't know the difference bewteen "zooming' and "interpreting a gesture based on two inputs". If I'm right, then there's no way to auto-detect being able to swap the zoom gesture with a mouse + scroll wheel input. That would mean the scroll wheel would provide bizarre results for just about any Android app running on the PC.

The scroll wheel is not an alternative to multi-touch-input.

No offense but that is a weak argument. I never said it was a replacement for multi-touch-input. I said it could be a viable alternative for pinch-to-zoom, which is a subset of multi-touch. Nothing you said makes it sound like it wouldn't work. It probably wouldn't be perfect but the functionality would be there.

I didn't say you said it was. What I said was the app emulating the Android device would need to know the difference between being a generic multi-touch gesture and an actual 'zoom' or you're going to get undesired behaviour.

I know you're not convinced, but that actually is a pretty compelling argument of why it's not as simple as you've made it out to be. Think about it.

I didn't say you said it was. What I said was the app emulating the Android device would need to know the difference between being a generic multi-touch gesture and an actual 'zoom' or you're going to get undesired behaviour.

I know you're not convinced, but that actually is a pretty compelling argument of why it's not as simple as you've made it out to be. Think about it.

I still think that it would be a suitable substitute, and yes I can write code and can think of ways to capture the mouse position and input to emulate pinch-to-zoom. What I fail to see is why anyone would want to run mobile apps on a PC, but that wasn't what we are debating. On that note, I would like to thank you for the civil debate. All too often these days/. descends into 4chan-space with regards to disagreements.

the defining range problem is easy- when you click down, that is your zero point, when you roll it up as Fwy as you can, it's equal to spreading your fingers apart as far as you can, and vice versa. Most pinch to zoom apps, i.e. Image galleries, won't zoom in to the max with one pinch; you typically have to use around 3 or 4... Same with the wheel, click down, roll up.. Click down, roll up... Click down, roll up. You could do it at the same speed as pinching, try it on your mouse.

sorry to reply to myself, the problem about the software knowing when it's a zoom and when it's a multi-touch pinch... Can't you bind the click wheel to always equal a multi-touch pinch, and just let the position of the mouse determine whether to zoom or not, just like pinching in certain areas on the screen? Also, I may not patent this, but if anyone tries to, this is prior art!;-)

First off most Android apps suck. Second, they're built for touch screens. Third most Android apps suck. Fourth, most Android apps are built to circumvent limitations in the phones browser and the download speed. Fifth most Android apps suck.

You guys are missing the point! This is all about Windows 8 tablets, which are going to be on the market very soon. The Windows app store is going to be sparse, and honestly, the biggest drawback to getting a Windows tablet. With Bluestacks, you get all the Metro apps AND all your android apps. This is a HUGE deal.

Think about when Intel comes out with the next generation of ultra low power x86 processors: Windows 8 tablets running on x86. You get everything you could want: Real desktop apps, Metro Apps, and all the Android smartphone/tablet apps. Throw it in a case with a bluetooth keyboard + trackpack (or mouse), and why would anyone need or want a laptop? I think it could probably replace the desktop for many users.

I'm telling you, this is HUGE. It will allows Windows 8 tablets to overcome their barrier to entering the market: a mature app store.

Let's get it right: you want to emulate an emulator that emulates a Linux system? Especially now that Android changes have been merged into upstream kernels, this seems to be Ruby Goldbergesque to say the least. It's pretty trivial to get text-mode Android to run in a chroot, it might be tricky to get graphics right. I did not try that -- if you're satisfied in system-in-a-box, VirtualBox and/or KVM work well enough.